Disruption has stormed into our lives without exception this year. The world is terrorised by a mysterious threat, and we’re in desperate need of answers.
As the scientists work day after day to concoct a vaccine, the rest of us are on damage control. To minimise the effect of the disruption on our daily lives, we need to gather our resources, gain a bird’s eye view of the situation, and find the best route out. So, what was to be our guiding light?
Not just any Excel spreadsheet – one using a file format invented 33 years ago. And one which cut off 16,000 case results due to a basic design feature, massively underestimating Covid-19 cases at a pivotal point in the UK’s second wave.
It can be easy to get political over this situation but, in truth, this is demonstrative of a far more worrying international trend that Covid-19 has revealed. Tech has failed to cope. Our international, full-scale stress test has us in over our heads, and that’s unnerving. All of society’s confidence in smartphones, drones, voice-activated assistants and smart doorbells is hiding the truth: when it comes to real, revolutionary technologies that will benefit us all, we have no idea what we’re doing.
We have got so used to technology solving most of our problems – GPS finding where we should be, Google finding us the answers, even Tinder finding us a date – that the expectations weighing on technology’s role in handling the Covid-19 crisis were heavy and palpable. The world indeed had breath that was bated.
But, no, the machines haven’t saved us. The robots didn’t take care of the sick. The algorithms didn’t help the most vulnerable. The solutions have been human and, in many ways, basic. To avoid getting sick:
Some technologies have proven themselves. Video conferencing has allowed us to keep our communities together even while we are apart, and the cloud has helped many organisations to work from home without a hitch. But the virus is still in control. When it comes to mustering the ingenuity, innovation and drive to see off the disruption, it’s been people who have risen to the occasion. Key workers, up and down the country, have automatically jumped up to care for those who are sick. They have programmed themselves to work overtime every day, and keyed into the needs of the vulnerable. They have been the steady code keeping the country going. So, where does that leave people like me? The data scientists, the academics, the engineers, the IT specialists? Where have they been during this pandemic? Here is the truth: technology is able to help us fight off challenges as big and global as a health emergency.
